When a Chinese monk broke into a hidden cave in 1900, he uncovered one of the world’s great literary secrets: a time capsule from the ancient Silk Road. Inside, scrolls were piled from floor to ceiling, undisturbed for a thousand years. The gem within was the Diamond Sutra of AD 868. This key Buddhist teaching, made 500 years before Gutenberg inked his press, is the world’s oldest printed book.

The Silk Road once linked China with the Mediterranean. It conveyed merchants, pilgrims and ideas. But its cultures and oases were swallowed by shifting sands. Central to the Silk Road’s rediscovery was a man named Aurel Stein, a Hungarian-born scholar and archaeologist employed by the British service.

Undaunted by the vast Gobi Desert, Stein crossed thousands of desolate miles with his fox terrier Dash. Stein met the Chinese monk and secured the Diamond Sutra and much more. The scroll’s journey—by camel through arid desert, by boat to London’s curious scholars, by train to evade the bombs of World War II—merges an explorer’s adventures, political intrigue, and continued controversy.

The Diamond Sutra has inspired Jack Kerouac and the Dalai Lama. Its journey has coincided with the growing appeal of Buddhism in the West. As the Gutenberg Age cedes to the Google Age, the survival of the Silk Road’s greatest treasure is testament to the endurance of the written word.

EXCERPT

Beneath a jeweled canopy in a leafy garden, the Buddha sits cross-legged on his lotus throne. Monks and bodhisattvas surround him. At his feet kneels an elderly barefoot disciple named Subhuti, his black slippers neatly beside him on a prayer mat.
Subhuti’s palms are together in supplication and he directs a reverential gaze toward the Enlightened One in a quest for answers to life’s greatest questions. That image forms the frontispiece of the Diamond Sutra discovered in the Library Cave.
At the opposite end of the scroll is the answer to a different question: how do we know the age of this singular document? There, a brief note reveals the answer: on the thirteenth day of the fourth moon of the ninth year of the Xiantong era. On the Chinese calendar, this corresponds to May 11, 868. It is this colophon which has established the Diamond Sutra’s unique claim: that this complete scroll is the oldest dated printed book in the world. It was created 600 years before Gutenberg got ink on his fingers. And it was made of a material—paper—that in 868 was unknown in the West.
The scroll is sixteen feet five inches long and eleven inches high, and explicitly says it was produced to be given away for free. It is woodblock printed, so it is possible hundreds of copies were made, although this is the only one known to have survived. As well as the date, the colophon tells who commissioned the sutra and why.
It reads: “Reverently made for universal distribution by Wang Jie on behalf of his two parents.” Who this devoted son was, no one knows. He was probably wealthy to have commissioned the creation of a scroll with such an intricate frontispiece. But we do know he had it made as an act of merit, a good deed.
Between the ends of the famous scroll is one of Buddhism’s most popular and revered teachings. It begins, as sutras typically do, with the phrase “thus I have heard.” These are the words of the disciple Ananda, who is said to have memorized the Buddha’s every teaching. The sutra then tells the circumstances in which the sermon was delivered. It relates how one morning, before noon, the Buddha put on his monk’s robe, picked up his bowl and went into the nearby city of Sravasti to beg from house to house for his food.
The Buddha returned to the Jetavana Vihara where he lived with 1,250 monks. The Buddha ate the food he had been given, put away his bowl, washed his feet and sat down. A number of monks approached him and sat at his side.
Among them was the Venerable Subhuti, and the sutra unfolds as a dialogue between the two. Subhuti is said to have been the nephew of Sudatta, the wealthy layman who covered Prince Jeta’s park with gold to create the garden in which they sat. Although an intelligent young man, Subhuti had a temper so furious he was shunned by those who knew him. He cursed humans and animals alike.
Even the Buddha is said to have told him that his short temper was written on his face. After hearing the Buddha’s teachings, Subhuti was transformed; he developed a calm mind and became a prominent disciple.
In the sutra, Subhuti asks the Buddha questions about the practice of generosity, about enlightenment, and about how to be rid of attachment, the cause of all suffering. Subhuti wants to know whether, 500 years on, anyone will understand and practice the Buddha’s teachings and is reassured they will. On contemplating the answers the Buddha gives him, Subhuti is moved to tears.
Subhuti also asks what this teaching should be called. This is often translated as the Diamond Cutter or the Diamond That Cuts Through Illusion. The Buddha, too, asks questions of Subhuti that test how well his disciple has understood their conversation.
The Buddha is said to have first taught the Diamond Sutra toward the end of his life, and it is considered a distillation of earlier teachings. At its core, the sutra is about the nature of reality, how things actually exist. Nothing is what it seems, he says. When stripped of our illusions, we realize everything, including ourselves, is constantly changing and that nothing exists independently.
When we look at a book, for example, we typically think it has never been anything else. But a book, even one as enduring as Stein’s copy of the Diamond Sutra, was once just blank paper. Before then, it was a tree, a sapling, and a tiny seed that fell from another tree and so on. The implications of seeing the world in this way are far-reaching.
The failure to do so leads ultimately to suffering. The sutra concludes with a poetic verse that summarizes this.
Thus shall you think of this fleeting world:
A star at dawn, a bubble in a stream,
A flash of lightning in a summer cloud,
A flickering lamp, a phantom, and a dream.

Reprinted with permission from Journeys on the Silk Road: A Desert Explorer, Buddha’s Secret Library, and the Unearthing of the World’s Oldest Printed Book, by Joyce Morgan and Conrad Walters. Published by Lyons Press, an imprint of Globe Pequot Press (2012).